Background prior art relating to electronic document reading devices can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,124,851, US2004/0201633, US2006/0133664, US2006/0125802, US2006/0139308, US2006/0077190, US2005/0260551, U.S. Pat. No. 6,124,851, U.S. Pat. No. 6,021,306, US2005/0151742, and US2006/0119615. Examples of electronic document reading devices are the Iliad Ilex®, the Amazon Kindle® and the Sony® Reader. Background prior art relating to power saving can be found in: US2007/0028086, US2007/0115258, and U.S. Pat. No. 7,058,829.
We have previously described electronic document reading devices using an electrophoretic display with a flexible or flex-tolerant backplane based on plastic (solution-deposited) electronics, for example in our earlier applications WO2007144549, WO2009053743, WO2009053740 and WO2009053747. Various further improvements in eReaders are described in our patents/applications US2010-0066685; WO/2011/048424; WO/2009/053738; GB2446499; GB2446500; GB2446302; and GB2458106. We have also described electronic reading device touch screen technology in, for example, WO2007/012899 and WO2011/036492.
We have also described techniques for fabricating thin, flexible, large-area displays, in particular using a plastic active matrix backplane bearing organic thin film transistors, which may be configured to drive, for example, an electrophoretic display. Some representative examples of such case are WO2007/144549; WO 2006/059162; WO 2006/056808; WO 2006/061658; WO 2006/106365; and WO 2006/129126.
We are here particularly concerned with improvements to the user-experience of devices of this general type.